The Trailing Spouse

by Jo Furniss

  “Oh, I’m sorry!”

  “—and Josie is particularly sensitive after losing her mother a few years ago.”

  “I understand, and we’ll take it into account, but she needs to recognize the danger she’s posed to students who are less savvy.” He offered to set up a session with the school counselor, and once that was arranged, he rang off. There was a whisper as the kitchen door slid open: she’d forgotten about her mother.

  “How old is she?” Laura asked.

  “Seventeen.”

  “Oh, well then . . .” She looked away, matter closed. “I took myself to London at the age of sixteen.”

  The school of hard knocks, Amanda thought. Laura’s ingenue mistakes, the sweat and tears—whispered hints that there may have been blood, sweat, and tears. But those dark times were overshadowed by the bright lights of her sparkling rise as she turned model, turned muse, turned socialite, turned lady of the manor, turned bankrupt, turned full circle. At no point, judging by the autobiography published a decade ago to the delight of the gutter press but to little acclaim or financial return, did she turn into a mother.

  “I’ll call us a cab then, shall I?” Amanda asked.

  “Can’t we save the money and walk?”

  “It’s the other side of the causeway. And it’s pissing down.”

  She left her mother to disapprove of the kitchen as well as her language, and went to change her shoes. On the way, she opened Josie’s bedroom door. The bed was made. The air con was running (she switched it off—not as profligate as her mother seemed to think). The laptop was gone, but Josie often took it to school. Amanda called Josie’s cell phone, which went to voice mail, and sent a careful text asking where she planned to spend the day, considering they both knew she wasn’t in school.

  In her own bathroom, she studied her face in a magnifying mirror, compartmentalizing herself to a sculpted eyebrow, a teardrop earlobe, the kind of philtrum that a face reader in Chinatown once said signified a deep imagination. She resembled her mother very closely if you took it feature by feature. Gullible eyes, prim nose, mouth tapering to arrow slits. But, somehow, the sum of Amanda’s parts added up to less than her mother’s. A spark shone in Laura so that she seemed permanently backlit; it was beyond beauty. It was the glow of the fire that drove her to London at the age of sixteen to seize her fortune. Losing it was Amanda’s father’s fault; everyone agreed on that, even her father.

  Amanda didn’t have her mother’s spark. Instead she was a mirror image—a reverse life story: childhood riches to rabbit-in-headlights poverty when the parental funds dried up, and back to riches when a husband came along. Her life achievements amounted to being born lucky and marrying well. Even the profit she’d made on her Camden house had disappeared into the ether of their joint bank account because she made the stupid decision (against Ed’s advice, in fact) to transfer her funds to Singapore, back when she felt she could better assert her independence by having her own money. Maybe her mother was self-absorbed and remote and circumnavigated the globe on a leaking ship that peddled Christian propaganda to the poor, but at least she lived.

  “I thought you’d forgotten about me,” Laura said, when Amanda returned. She had forgiven the elegant sofa enough to sit on it. But she kept her back to the extravagant view.

  “I was trying to reach Josie. She’s been thrown out of school.”

  “Happens to the best of us. Surely it’s not your problem to deal with?”

  “I’m her stepmother.”

  “Exactly.”

  Amanda fiddled with the awkward clasp on her least expensive sandals. “She’s vulnerable after everything that happened—what she saw her mother do.” She didn’t mention that their helper had died, didn’t want to endure her mother’s scrutiny on that matter too. “I think Josie might be depressed, actually,” she said instead.

  “Well, of course she is. You were dreadfully moody at seventeen.”

  “How would you know? I was at boarding school.”

  Laura gave a high laugh, like someone dinging a glass to prompt silence. She picked up the Prada box from the coffee table and inspected it from all sides. “I knew Miuccia and Patrizio when they first took over at Prada. They were radical then, can you believe it? No logo. Ahead of the times.”

  “Ed bought it. He brings me presents from all his trips.”

  “Men do that. Cats too. Do you remember Bluebeard?”

  Amanda watched her mother’s hands, the color of papyrus, curling the pristine ribbon. “Haven’t thought about him in years.”

  “Well, you were still young when he died. Disgusting animal, really—filthy manners—but I was fond of him. Big handsome tomcat. Used to leave birds’ wings on my pillow. Only the wings. Mostly sparrows and starlings. Though the first time your father went off, Bluebeard brought me a dove.” Laura tugged the bow. Taut silk slipped through her fingers. She peeled away crackling layers of tissue until the girl’s painted face peeped out. Laura smiled a little and hummed through her nose.

  “Why don’t you keep it?” Amanda said suddenly. “It’s your birthday at the end of the month. I can never send you anything on the ship. Let me give you a present.”

  Laura pressed the paper back over the wallet and jammed the lid on top.

  “What on earth would I do with it? Give it to charity, if you don’t want it.” She glared at her watch. “Where’s this taxi?”

  Amanda snatched up her phone and checked the taxi app. “Can we have lunch?” she said. I need to talk to someone, anyone. Even you.

  “I don’t want to intrude. You’re so busy.”

  “I haven’t seen you in eighteen months. And now you’re sailing for another year. Normal people don’t turn up unannounced—in Singapore—as though they’ve popped around for a cup of tea. Can’t you stay for lunch?”

  “Is that what normal people do?”

  “Yes, it is.” Amanda wanted to tell her mother that these expensive trinkets meant nothing. She wasn’t that kind of woman. But she needed to sell them to get money for treatment because otherwise she would be left as hollow and disappointing as an empty Prada box. All wrapping, that’s what Amanda would become: as flimsy as tissue and held together by ribbon.

  But her mother moved to the elevator. “You go to lunch if you like,” she said. “I have a ship to run.”

  Chapter 11

  Sharmila Menon’s office boasted a view of the Supreme Court, a glass structure shaped exactly like a flying saucer that hovered over the surrounding buildings. When the lawyer bustled in and caught Camille snapping a photo of the surreal design, she loosed her distinctive chesty laugh. “People say that if we get invaded, it will take off and carry the government to safety.” She dropped an armload of files onto an otherwise pristine desk. “We love conspiracy theories.”

  “People are always telling me there are plainclothes police on every street corner.”

  “Oh, that one’s true.” She said this with the kind of straight face that left Camille wondering whether or not she was joking. “Seriously, there’s no need, we have CCTV. Much cheaper.” The lawyer squeezed past bookshelves to take her seat. Her office was well located but tiny, its walls lined with files labeled by the same looping cursive. Some of the case names Camille recognized from her work with HELP. Sharmila had attractive writing, baroque but legible. Distinctly female. Bold.

  “I have a client at one o’clock . . .” She waved Camille into a seat.

  “Thanks for seeing me. Something came up at the British High Commission, a helper who committed suicide at a British couple’s apartment. I think she was underage, and I’m suspicious about the husband. But I can’t work on it myself.” Camille laid out the details, including the trouble it had caused with Josh. Sharmila made notes and then clicked her pen three times.

  “So what can we do with this information? We have three options. Number one: we pass it to HELP and they add her name to their statistics. The fifth Burmese helper to commit suicide in Singapore this year.
Number two: we pass it to Ruth Chin at Reuters—”

  “She was looking for an angle to run a story about the parliamentary debate.”

  “Yes, but I am not too hopeful she’d find it here. No evidence. She can’t print suspicions. Of course, if this maid had killed the husband—”

  “Edward Bonham.”

  “If she had killed him, then the press might be interested.” Sharmila reached for a bulging file and spun it around on the desk for Camille to see. “This is a case I defended last year. A maid who killed her employer and tried to make it look like she fell down the stairs. The girl pleaded guilty, but I managed to commute her sentence from the death penalty to life imprisonment because of a history of abuse. No rest day for eighteen months and hadn’t left the employer’s premises for six months. In her statement she said—where is it?” Sharmila flipped a page. “Here: ‘I only see daylight when I hang clothes on the washing line.’” The lawyer paused for a moment to let that statement sink in; Camille could imagine how impressive she would be in court. “The maid was diagnosed with acute stress. I likened her experience to false imprisonment, like someone kept in a cellar by a madman.”

  Camille felt her throat thicken, partly in disgust at the treatment the maid had received and partly in awe of Sharmila’s command of the facts.

  “Another one. Indonesian girl convicted of harming an elderly woman in her care. I got her sentence reduced on medical grounds because she was severely malnourished: her employer only gave her leftovers.” She flipped a page. “I got this couple jailed for abusing two maids—they made them whip each other with bamboo canes.”

  “So you’re saying that what happened to the Bonhams’ helper is nothing special?”

  Sharmila closed the file and put it back on the shelf. She clicked her pen three times before continuing. “No, I’m saying that some days I feel like I’m bailing out a flood with a teacup. The media is only interested in the most extreme cases—the nutjobs on both sides: evil employers, crazed maids. Ideally, both in one story. But most of us don’t live at the extremes. It is quite possible for this system to work—I myself employ someone to care for my toddler, and between us we make a happy household—but not if the law continues to abdicate responsibility. At the moment, we rely on market forces and the goodwill of the employer. I want to raise the standard of living for all maids via legislation.”

  “And how do we do that?”

  “We play the long game. We show that the law is not working. Which brings me to option three: investigate further. You said she was underage?”

  Camille related the conversation with Josie. When she mentioned the agency, Sharmila gave a snort. “Not the first time that name has come up in this office. Okay, so this is what we do.” She clicked her pen once and put it down. “I’m going to dig into the background of the girl and see if I can’t skewer this agency once and for all. There’s not much we can do about Bonham unless a postmortem shows the helper was full of this drug—”

  “Clonazepam. But—”

  “We can’t go after him out of vengeance or because he seems shifty or loose with the truth. We only have the law. Has he broken the law? Even if he was sleeping with his maid, has he broken the law? Maybe she was too young to work in Singapore as a maid, but she wasn’t under the age of consent.”

  “No, he hasn’t broken the law—as far as we know.”

  “So we don’t waste our time. And you don’t lose your job.”

  “Okay, so when will you—” Camille was interrupted by a shrill ring of Sharmila’s phone.

  “My one o’clock is here. Keep in touch, Camille. I like your verve.”

  Camille stepped out of the office into a wallop of sunshine that burned off her verve. As she walked to the taxi stand, she thought how it was true that Edward Bonham might not have broken the law—but what about morality? Even assuming Josie was right, and Awmi had been attracted to her employer, his behavior put the young woman in an impossible situation, one that could only end badly for her. Surely, as her senior in age and status, he should have had the maturity to resist?

  She’d leave it to Sharmila to focus on Awmi’s background. Meanwhile, Camille was free to scrutinize Bonham about his connection to her parents. During the taxi ride, she opened the email she’d drafted to him the day before. As the taxi reached the BHC, she hit “Send” before echoes of Josh’s voice could talk her out of it.

  Chapter 12

  Amanda scratched a mosquito bite on her elbow while she waited for the bank assistant to exit through the privacy door. As it clicked shut, she turned the key in the safety-deposit box. Her phone flashed a text from her mother, who was back on the library ship. Her three-hour visit to Singapore must be a new first for efficiency. Delightful as always, happy to see you doing well, with love Laura. What constituted “doing well” in her mother’s mind?

  Amanda removed her school reports from the safety-deposit box. Her teacher’s heavy calligraphy conveyed faint praise. She didn’t need to open the envelope; her fingers traced the surface as though she were reading its contents as braille. She could still hear her fluty voice: “Don’t worry about the results, dear, you’re pretty.” At least she never got suspended. She checked her phone; no response from Josie. But this was Singapore, one of the safest cities in the world. She was probably drowning her sorrows with ten-dollar lattes in a hipster coffee shop.

  Amanda put her school reports aside. There was a parcel of Polaroid pictures from a period when she had embraced the prettiness that her form mistress prized so highly. At least these amateurish nude shots had been taken pre–social media. Nowadays, Snapchat snapped up girls like her and snapped them in half. Or worse: their images circulated forever in dark corners of the web. Kelvin had said Josie’s forum was innocent chatter, but was that all? By comparison, Amanda’s sordid envelope of snaps seemed quaintly old-school. As she moved it aside, a Yale key landed in her lap. All she had left of the Camden terrace house, which she’d bought in a hurry when she realized her father was plundering her trust fund. By dumb luck, she’d bought well. It was ridiculous; the Dependant’s Pass meant she couldn’t control her own money, and a grown woman should be able to control her money. The Yale key clattered back into the box.

  She picked up her mother’s engagement ring. A massive emerald in a halo of diamonds. Amanda forced it over the knuckle of her ring finger and spread her hand to admire it. Then she lifted from the box a powder puff, as mottled as aged hands. She slipped the finger ribbon on next to the emerald and pressed the puff to her nose, breathing in her mother’s scent. Violets and rancid oil and something metallic, redolent of old coins. She wiped the powder puff across her forehead and swept it down each cheek before dropping these treasures back into the box.

  From her handbag she pulled out a ziplock bag. Her bare nails prized open the plastic zipper, and she slid out a key card printed with the logo of the MV Guanyin. Her mother had left her bag wide open on the console table. Too easy to pluck out a trophy and drop it into a nearby ginger jar.

  Amanda watched the card drop into the box. She rooted in her bag and found the Little Mermaid toothbrush. And, finally, Josie’s journal. She flipped to the scribbled Internet log-ins. Did one of these enable the girl to access the dark web? The fact was, Amanda had no clue. Maybe it was better to keep hold of the journal for the time being? She dropped it into her bag to take home, even though she cringed to have her things in the house. A glimpse of them, when she wasn’t prepared, turned her stomach.

  She dropped the lid of the safety-deposit box. The key turned with gossamer ease, and she felt a corresponding release in her skin, like undoing a pinching bra. She slid her secrets into the wall along with her shame.

  As soon as she got home, the solidity of the air revealed that Josie wasn’t there. The apartment had the aura of a dead thing—a rat or a mouse—as though death had left a stain. Josie couldn’t be at school because of the suspension, and she wasn’t answering her phone, so where was she? As a formali
ty, Amanda rapped on her bedroom door before going inside. A citrus smell from the en suite almost covered the gamey undertone of pheromones. It took Amanda back to the shower room at boarding school. Dressing under a towel, while her “friends” singled her out for unremitting compliments involving the word skinny closely followed by the word bitch. Her permanent state of contrition, as though slenderness were a sin against the sisterhood, meant she wore her skin and bones heavily. Twenty years later, all the girls in Singapore were coltish. It was like evolution had succumbed to public demand.

  The room was cluttered, but neat. Without the laptop, the desk was clear apart from a mug of pens and a block of Post-it notes. Maybe this mysterious scribble-of-a-girl blog might give a clue to Josie’s whereabouts. She’d already tried all the passwords from the journal; surely Josie had written this one down somewhere?

  Under the desk was a trash can, full to the brim. Hourglass remains of apple cores and snowballs of paper. She pulled one open and found the same style of anxious sketches that featured in the journal, this time depicting girls—girls running, girls cowering, girls falling—scribbled with dense strokes that matted the pages. Her stomach lurched to think that the disappearance of the journal might have distressed Josie enough to produce these jittery drawings.

  Amanda sat cross-legged on the floor with the waste paper. Most had been ripped to shreds and twirled through the air, flicking around like destinations on a departures board. One scrap came to rest beside her foot, a note in marker pen: WhoIsShe2000? Amanda picked up another fragment and read again: Who Is She? Each sliver of paper had the same scribbled words. And then there was one that broke the pattern; on the reverse was a scrawled address: www.a-scribble-of-a-girl.com. Josie’s blog, the one with the timer.

  Amanda pulled her phone out. The site loaded and the timer read: 13 days, 01 hours, 51 minutes. It could be counting down to Josie’s birthday, as Ed suggested. She worked it out on her fingers, but no: it was much longer than that until Josie’s birthday. She tried “WhoIsShe2000?” in the password box and the page reloaded.